Academic Activists Send A Published Paper Down The Memory Hole
No real surprise.
The left basically controls academia, and many on the left think that truth--if they believe in it at all--should be subordinated to politics.
As for the GMVH, it seems like there's an obvious explanation: males are less reproductively valuable than females. If I'm Mother Nature, I experiment on males. If I can produce even a couple of faster, fitter males at the top end of the curve, it's worth it...even though I'll also produce a couple (or even a fair number of) slower or otherwise defective males at the bottom of the distribution. The slow tail of the curve will likely fail to reproduce, either dying off or being ignored by females (other things being equal). Even in the worst-case scenarios, there are plenty of males in the fat part of the curve to keep producing offspring. Seems like there are all sorts of kinds of cases in which the species wins with a flatter male ability curve.
To my mind, the GMVH is just about the least surprising discovery there's ever been.
But apparently it's politically incorrect, even though it entails that the average male and the average female are equal. Not good enough for Big Sibling...so you don't get to read about it. Hate facts must be suppressed.
The left basically controls academia, and many on the left think that truth--if they believe in it at all--should be subordinated to politics.
As for the GMVH, it seems like there's an obvious explanation: males are less reproductively valuable than females. If I'm Mother Nature, I experiment on males. If I can produce even a couple of faster, fitter males at the top end of the curve, it's worth it...even though I'll also produce a couple (or even a fair number of) slower or otherwise defective males at the bottom of the distribution. The slow tail of the curve will likely fail to reproduce, either dying off or being ignored by females (other things being equal). Even in the worst-case scenarios, there are plenty of males in the fat part of the curve to keep producing offspring. Seems like there are all sorts of kinds of cases in which the species wins with a flatter male ability curve.
To my mind, the GMVH is just about the least surprising discovery there's ever been.
But apparently it's politically incorrect, even though it entails that the average male and the average female are equal. Not good enough for Big Sibling...so you don't get to read about it. Hate facts must be suppressed.
posted by Winston Smith at
6:01 PM
3 Comments:
" But apparently it's politically incorrect, even though it entails that the average male and the average female are equal. Not good enough for Big Sibling...so you don't get to read about it. Hate facts must be suppressed."
It's true that it GMVH generally accepts male/female equality at the means, but this doesn't mean it isn't a threat to an egalitarian view. Means are totally useless at explaining tons of aspects of human ability, for instance, research ability in math requires a minimum iq well above average. A significant difference in male iq variance will explain substantial outperformance among men in that field. In a less flattering comparison, criminality really only occurs among the subsection of the population that is substantially more aggressive than the mean. Men will also be outrepresented because their variance in aggression is way higher than women (and they probably also have a slightly higher mean in aggressiveness).
So if you are an egalitarian, you have to accept that this implies the belief is not biologically valid.
This is a weird point...I'm not sure how to think about it. I mean, you're right...but I also kinda think I'm right...that is, that even those who aren't happy with *this* kind of "diversity" ought to be mollified by the identical/similar means.
Me, I don't think any of it should bother anybody because, well, it is what it is. It doesn't do anything to undermine moral or political equality.
Hanging your hopes on equality of physical / mental attributes...not a very smart gamble. Especially if you're so picky as to require that the distributions all be the shape, too.
But I think you might be righter than I am.
So I don't actually think equality of means matters at all in itself, again because the actual predictive power is found when selecting a subset of the distribution that is actually relevant to the question at hand (high iq for maths, high aggression for criminality, high muscle responsiveness for athletics, etc.). In some sort of stylistic sense, equality at the mean is interesting, but it rarely actually matters when analyzing a productive activity.
As to whether it's smart to hang your hat on biological equality, obviously it's not smart, because it's wrong. But if you don't do it, you have to accept that an egalitarian point is inefficient. If you equalize representation of women in maths, but 80% of the capable population is male, you're going to harm the quality of your maths research program. Or you're going to hire way too many maths professors. Not only is the Leftist point inefficient, there is also the awkward corollary that the inequality wasn't actually some form of "social injustice" at all.
The inefficiency counterargument is (literally) killer in most circumstances, and the Left likely knows this, or maybe more likely wants to stamp out any possible academic opposition to their ideology and dumbly found one that is a genuine threat.
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